Breaking the Rules

When I was a Boy Scout, dur­ing one of the meet­ings we held a com­pe­ti­tion between the dif­fer­ent Patrols to see who could work well together and come up with the best paper airplane.

Now, I was part of the senior Patrol, made up of the elder scouts, so we tended to more expe­ri­enced and per­haps a tad cyn­i­cal. Maybe.

We quickly real­ized that we were pro­vided a few sheets of paper, but more impor­tantly we were allowed to use any change we had (sup­pos­edly to add bal­ance and weight to the air­plane.) We cir­cled up to block the view of any of the lead­ers or other scouts, and quickly came up with our design.

We pooled our change on one of the unfolded sheets, and then balled it up around the change, cre­at­ing a nice, heavy, paper ball.

We kept it hid­den behind our backs and shoo’ed any curi­ous peo­ple away, let­ting all the other patrols make their flights first. We then went and one of our base­ball play­ers stepped up with our crum­pled ball of paper, he threw it all the way across the room, hit­ting it against the oppo­site wall where it exploded in a shower of coins.

No one else’s plane had even made it half the dis­tance of the room. Unfor­tu­nately we were dis­qual­i­fied for the ‘spirit of the competition.’

Which is too bad, I think the cat­a­pulted flight pod could be a viable flight option…

The point is that we fol­lowed the rules, destroyed the com­pe­ti­tion, but were given noth­ing for our work. If you make it a com­pe­ti­tion, give it strict rules, but real­ize you’re going to be outsmarted.